Authors: Donald E Westlake
“Yes, but that could be any time.”
“
My
chart says I lose my partner
now.
”
“It could be any time in the next few weeks,” Cornell said. “And it isn’t predetermined anyway, it’s simply the
leaning.
”
“But everything—Wait, let me see what the progressed—” He bent over the papers and his own books, turning pages, taking notes, losing some of his incipient hysteria in his absorption with the work.
Cornell said to me, “This will take a minute or two, Mr. Tobin. I’m sorry. But if it’s true—”
“If what is true?”
“Well, you can never be absolutely sure,” he said, “but it sounds as though David is going to die.”
“Please!” Lane said, his head still bowed over the books and papers. He was trembling like a nervous dog.
I said, “Could it mean he’ll be arrested?” Whatever happened, I wanted them both calmer than this.
“It could mean all sorts—”
The door opened. Lane kept studying, but Cornell and I both turned our heads to look, and saw Detective Manzoni come into the room.
M
ANZONI SAID, “MR. TOBIN
, you’re a damn fool.”
I didn’t say anything; unfortunately, Cornell did. “It isn’t Mr. Tobin’s fault, Mr. Manzoni,” he said. “I’m the one who hired him to help—”
“You
hired
him?”
“Yes, of course.” He didn’t get it, he didn’t know why he should keep his mouth shut. But there was no reason why he should have known any better. He said, “Mr. Tobin wouldn’t be involved in all this if it wasn’t for me, so there’s no reason to—”
“Just a minute. You. You! Wake up!”
He meant Lane, who finally sprang his head up from the books and papers, looking blank and frightened. “What? What?”
“What’s your name, is it Lane?”
“What? Yes!”
“All right, Lane, I want you to listen to something.” The door was still open and the uniformed patrolman was standing there; Manzoni was collecting witnesses from all over. He said to Cornell, “Now, tell me what Mr. Tobin’s doing here.”
Cornell had belatedly realized he shouldn’t be talking, and now, instead of answering, he glanced uncertainly at me.
Manzoni snapped, “Never mind looking at him now! Tell me again why he’s here. And you,” to Lane. “You pay attention.”
“But this is important!” Lane cried. “You don’t under—”
“You shut up, Lane. It’s Ronnie I want to hear from. Well, Ronnie?”
“Go ahead,” I said. There was nothing to be gained by stalling at this point.
Cornell said, in a subdued voice, “I hired him to help me find Jamie’s murderer.” And then, more fiercely, “Because the police wouldn’t even
try!
Meaning
you,
Mr. Manzoni! Go ahead and remember that, too, Cary!”
Manzoni looked at me, and if he felt any satisfaction, I couldn’t see it in his face. “I warned you last night, Mr. Tobin,” he said. “You know what this is, you being here like this?”
“A felony,” I said. “Working without a private investigator’s license.” Saying it for Cornell’s benefit.
“More than that,” he said. “It’s a personal insult directed at me. You’re standing there saying I don’t know how to do my job.”
“You don’t,” I said. Not loudly, not argumentatively. He didn’t, and I knew he didn’t, and I said it.
He blinked. But then he said, “I looked up your history this morning, Mr. Tobin. There’s some people I might listen to when they’d tell me I didn’t know my job. You aren’t one of them.”
“I know.”
Lane, who had gone back to his books and papers, suddenly cried, “Here it is! Ronnie, here it is!”
Manzoni glared at him, annoyed at the interruption. “What the hell is this?”
Lane shouted, “Ruler of the eighth in the fourth, and ruler of the twelfth in the eighth!”
“I told you before to shut up,” Manzoni said angrily. “One more outburst and I’ll have you put out of here.”
Lane didn’t say anything else, but not because of Manzoni’s threat. He was perched on the edge of his chair, anxious, terrified, even bouncing slightly as he watched Cornell leaf through the pages of one of the books.
Manzoni turned back to me. In relief, I think; I had attitudes and reactions he could understand. He said, “It’s for the insult, Mr. Tobin, and for no other reason. You could practice anything you wanted without a license, and I wouldn’t worry about it very much. But it’s the insult that offends me.”
I said, “There’s no doubt in your mind? This man in the bed here has suffered a lot already. Are you sure you aren’t making him suffer even more than he has to—are you
sure?
”
“This what in the bed?”
“Faggot,” I said. “Human being.”
“You’re also a social worker without a license, is that it?”
“You don’t think you’re doing your job right any more than I do. You
know
you’re railroading Cornell.”
“That’s a lie!” He was stung now, and I became aware for the first time of the heavy implacability of his anger. And how easily Cornell or any of the fragile blossoms around Jamie Dearborn could all unwittingly hit that button in his head. Manzoni would be a frightening enemy because he was such an accomplished liar when lying to himself.
“You do know it,” I said, quietly insisting. I had no real hope of breaking through, but perhaps if I was quiet enough, something of what I said might seep through the stone wall of his resistance, like water into a basement.
Where I would have preferred to be right now.
Cornell read softly, “Death of parents, danger from falling or falling objects. Eighth house; an unsatisfactory finish, many troubles, secret enemies die, problems with inheritance.”
“It’s now,” Lane said. Pushing papers and books from his lap to the floor, he rose like a robot and stared blindly around. “It’s now.”
Manzoni said heavily, “What the hell is all this?”
I said, “Astrology. They believe in astrology.”
“Someone’s going to kill David,” Lane said, very quietly. He stared at me. “Mitch? You’ll have to go help him!”
“That’s enough of that,” Manzoni said. “Your friend Mitch is coming along with me. He has a statement to make.”
“Mitch, you
have
to go!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll have to go with Detective Manzoni. You go on home and call—”
“That’s all, Mr. Tobin,” Manzoni said. “Come along.” He extended a hand toward my elbow, without quite touching it. His face and manner said,
Don’t force me to use physical means, because I will enjoy using them.
“Mitch!”
“Call Remington,” I told him, and started toward the door. “He’ll help you,” I said.
He called my name again; his voice was full of disbelief that I would walk away from him when his stars said there was trouble.
I already had trouble.
Manzoni and I left the hospital.
T
HERE WAS A TIME
in this country when it was easier than it is now for a police officer to hold a citizen for an extended period of time without charging him with any particular offense or permitting him any phone calls or other contact with the outside world. Back when confessions were worth something in court, it was standard operating procedure in some kinds of cases to keep a suspect for days, for a week or more, and hammer at him with teams of detectives in relays, moving him from precinct to precinct if necessary to keep him away from his lawyers and family until his resistance was finally broken down and he was prepared to trade away a confession that might cost his life for a chance at eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.
A lot has changed in recent years. The confession means a lot less than it used to, and the more abrasive police techniques have been softened here and there. But that doesn’t mean the police are, as the editorial writers like to claim, “handcuffed.” Far from it. They still have more weapons in their arsenal than the private citizen has in his.
One of the most effective of those weapons is the simplest: red tape. The first two hours I was at Manzoni’s precinct house were spent in the droning process of filling out forms. I knew the technique, I’d used it myself more than once when I was on the force, but it was effective just the same. I sat there in that overheated office—snow was falling lazily again outside the second-story windows, having stopped for several hours this morning—and a bored, lazy uniformed patrolman sat at a typewriter and asked me questions and slowly pecked the answers onto form after form. I knew most of this paper was for no reason at all, that once I was gone the forms would all—or most of them—be thrown in the garbage, but I hadn’t been given any choice. So I answered the questions, and tried not to look at my watch every five minutes, and tried to find something to occupy my attention while the minutes and the seconds crept slowly by.
I hate to be in a police station these days; it brings back too much of the past, when I was a different person living a different life. Other individuals in my current position might help to push the time by a little faster by becoming absorbed in the flow and movement of the bullpen, the large open room full of battered wooden desks where the detective squad worked, and where I was now being given the stall treatment. Others might enjoy watching the plainclothesmen come in, sit at their desks, answer phones, drink paper cups of water from the water cooler in the far corner, peck out reports on typewriters at the tables along the wall where my typist and I were sitting, occasionally spend time talking with visitors who had come in voluntarily or been brought upstairs by uniformed patrolmen; all the quiet natural life of every bullpen in every precinct house in the city. Others in my position might distract their minds with that, but I couldn’t. The movement around me was the worst torture of all; for me, the endless pointless questions and the slow dragged-out filling-in of blanks on useless forms was the distraction.
After an hour there was a change of typists, a second uniformed man taking the place of the first. The second one was, if anything, slower than the first, and more impersonal. He also spent longer away at the filing cabinets, finding other forms to fill out.
And through all that time, I never once saw Manzoni. He had brought me up here, deposited me in this chair, gone across the room to talk briefly with the first of my typists, and had then gone into the office marked, in black lettering on opaque glass,
CAPTAIN OF DETECTIVES.
I hadn’t seen him since.
Nor did I see him now. It was a different plainclothesman who came over at last and said to typist number two, “When you’re finished with him, take him down to room 214.”
“Right.”
The plainclothesman gave me a flat incurious look and walked away.
There were no more forms. The typist slowly finished the one he was working on, double-checked all the items with me—as usual, most of the items being the same on every form—and then at last got to his feet and said, “Come on.”
We left the bullpen and went down the hall together, not speaking. The hall was wide and high-ceilinged, with an old wooden floor and with large light globes hanging down at intervals from the paint-peeling ceiling. The walls were painted dark green to a height of four feet, and then light green above that. They were scratched in many places. The paint peeling from the ceiling was a cream color, darkened by age.
Room 214 contained a gray metal desk, a swivel chair behind the desk, a wooden chair with slatted back beside the desk, a black linoleum floor, a gray metal filing cabinet, a round dark green metal wastebasket, a cork bulletin board on the wall beside the desk, gray walls, once-white ceiling, and a wide window covered with a Venetian blind.
“Wait here,” the typist said, and closed the door, and went away.
The room was empty, except for me. There was nothing on the bulletin board, except two slightly rusty thumb tacks. I went over to the window and separated two Venetian blind slats and looked out at the gray bricks of an air shaft. I opened the drawers of the filing cabinet, and they were empty. I opened the drawers of the desk: pencils, ballpoint pens, sheets of blank paper, paper clips, rubber bands, a half-used pack of matches, envelopes of various sizes. Not enough of anything, and nothing of a personal nature.
There was one slat missing from the back of the wooden chair.
I went back to the window, opened the blinds, raised them. I stood there looking out at the wall awhile, then walked around the room, then went back and leaned against the high window sill and looked at the room awhile.
The light source was—other than the window, which was very dirty—a fluorescent light fixture hanging from the ceiling. A long one, with the kind of thing across the fluorescent tubes that looks like the cross-hatched interior of an egg carton. The fixture was obviously a recent addition to the room; more recent, in any case, than the rest of the room. Some money had been spent on modernization, and the result was a fluorescent light in an interrogation room.
Despite myself, I found my mind turning to the precinct building I had worked out of—the age of it, the feel and look and smell of it, the odd touches of modernization here and there as dribs of money had become available. And Jock, who had found most things funny, would have laughed at a fluorescent light in a room like this. If I hadn’t killed him.
I was there forty-five minutes, and I was pacing back and forth, trying to control nerves and rage, when the door at last opened and two people I didn’t know walked in. Both were in civilian clothes, and one carried a stenographer’s notebook. He was slender, somewhat shabbily dressed, and had a small neat head and wore large black-framed eyeglasses. The other one, a stocky man of about forty, wore a wrinkled brown suit, the jacket open over a wrinkled white shirt and a wrinkled narrow dark brown tie. I looked at him, and found myself wondering what Ronald Cornell would think of his clothing, and what this man would think of Ronald Cornell’s clothing, and with that thought I managed to regain control of myself and not do anything stupid.
I had been very close to doing something stupid. Screaming, or hitting somebody, or trying to leave.
The brown-suited man said to me, “Sit down, Mr. Tobin,” gesturing at the wooden chair beside the desk. Then he looked around and said, “No other chair?”